When the Parents are Away, the Children will Play

Whilst Chris and I were having all kinds of adventures in Atlanta, the children were, oddly enough, still alive and occupied. Weird how they don't just cease to exist when we're out of town for a few days.

Courtesy of my mother's facebook page, I have record of a few of their exploits while we were gone and they were in the care of said mother. I'm pretty sure these are completely in the wrong order, by the way.

...running in the sprinklers...

...visiting Discovery Gateway on a Girls' Day Out...

This day seemed particularly nicely worked out to me. Audrey, Megan, and Nicole had a girls' day with Grandma Karrie and Deborah, Ben went to play with the twins at Lisa's house, and Dalton had a chance to be the only visitor at his cousin's house. Sounded to me like everyone had a chance to hang out with just their favorite people for a while without the entire crowd. That's a nice change from normal, don't you think? I don't have any pictures of Ben from this day, though I'm sure he had all kinds of fun.

...going to Hogle Zoo...

...recreating history at Silver Lake...

Twice before, Lisa and I have taken all our kids up to Silver Lake and taken a picture of them all together. It's fun to see the change over the years, from then until now. They keep getting bigger, and there keeps being more of them...

2010

2011

2013

Thank you, Mom, Lisa, Deborah, Amy, and everyone else for helping to take care of our kids while we were gone. It made life much easier for us to not worry about them at all for a few days.

To round it out, here are a few more random pictures.

#1: We stopped in Salt Lake and had lunch with my family before continuing on to Idaho for Heather and Brandon's wedding. My apologies to them, especially to my dad, for Utah becoming a pit stop on our way to so many Wampler events. I do sincerely wish we had been able to spend more time with you on all these trips.

My eyes are closed because Mom kept taking forever to actually snap the picture, so we sat and smiled like idiots for a really long time and had no idea when the picture was actually taken. This was the third or fourth attempt and we gave up.

#2: Apparently, Ben was quite upset that Amy left in a separate vehicle after they visited the zoo. This is his grumpy face.

#3: When we finally reappeared after being in Georgia, the kids were only mildly interested in seeing us. No worries--I totally expected that. I was amused, though, when a while later Ben came running into the kitchen, barely glanced at me and said "Hi, Mom," then immediately grabbed Grandma's hand and pulled her into the family room to show her the airplane he had built. He did a good job, I thought. Even though he yelled at me for coming in to see it, too. Ha.